One of the keys to mastery of FMAs is knowing how to translate a movement across different platforms. A good example of this is “gunting.” This is a scissors-like movement, characterized by the left hand parrying an attack while the right hand defangs or cuts the attacking limb.

Let’s start with this video. Modern Arnis players view banda y banda as the basis for the gunting concept.

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A straightforward move with lots of translations.

Empty Hand version of the gunting:

The FMA translation to knife:

The FMA translation to stick:

As one can see, one can use the same movement in different contexts. The key is figuring out how to apply FMA moves across different platforms.

The video below gives some guidance on how to translate the stick to empty hand.

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In the video, I explained three stages to this analytical approach.

  1. Practice the stick movement;
  2. Analyze the stick movement;
  3. Replicate the stick movement with the empty hand equivalent.

This is fairly obvious. Getting a handle on this process takes time. The more experienced you are, the easier the translations get. If you are a newbie, it may be a bit more challenging and require an experienced instructor to show you how.

Digression: I started my martial arts journey in a kung fu style as an 18-year-old. The training sessions were heavy on conditioning and traditional Chinese kung fu forms. During my time in this style, we hardly delved into the forms’ applications or self-defence training applications.

One day, I asked a senior student about the applications for the forms. He responded sincerely, “You’ll know what to do when the time comes. The applications will just come out of nowhere.” I shit you not. Unless I massively misunderstood him, he said the applications would magically appear. 

As Master Ken of “Enter the Dojo” would say: “That’s total bullshit.”

Anyway, I have this experience in mind when explaining how to translate the stick movement. I try to make it as common sense as possible. I emphasize that it takes practice and that there is no magical approach to this.

Let’s go back to the video. I used single sinawali as an example.

  1. I practiced the single sinawali.
  2. At 1:17, I broke down single sinawali into its parts. Essentially, I broke it into a cross-body motion and a downward motion.
  3. I then replicated this with the empty hand equivalent.
  4. Next, I took the cross-body motion of single sinawali and transformed it into a parry. Wing Chun folks would recognize this as a “Pak Sao.”

In the remainder of the video, I applied the above process to palis-palis and a punyo technique.

Hopefully, this will give you some tools to figure out the empty hand equivalent of a stick technique or vice versa.

The bottom line is that this is what I love about FMAs!

Additional Reading